Monday, April 9, 2012

April 9, 2012 - Easter Buddies

We had a nice Easter yesterday. The kids woke up to find that the Easter Bunny did, in fact, know where Dar es Salaam is. While he probably wanted to hide eggs outside, the Easter Bunny was smart enough to know that sugary candy attracts all kinds of creatures here, not to mention that it doesn't take too much heat to melt Easter chocolate...so the eggs were all around the downstairs of our house. Grace and Noah had very different strategies for approaching the Easter egg hunt.

Noah was content to explore his basket and get started eating chocolate right away. It melted faster than he could put it away, but he was pretty happy to try and keep up. I think he found one or two other eggs, but was very interested in just eating the treats instead of continuing to hunt.

Grace, however, was hoarding eggs and having so much fun finding them in all of the creative places the Easter Bunny (who she just called "the Easter") hid them. I think her favorite was the egg underneath her Bamse's tshirt!

After our egg hunt, we went to Mass for the first time. Or I should say we TRIED to go to Mass. The only English mass is scheduled at 9:30 am and we arrived at 9:15, hoping we weren't too late to get a seat. HA! Big joke on us.

There was a huge crowd of people standing outside when we got there, and that was because the 7:45 am Kiswahili Mass was only 75% of the way finished! I am assuming that it didn't start on time because I've never heard of such a long Mass! So we waited. The music was wonderful even though we didn't know what they were saying. As we waited, people started creeping closer and closer to the doors of the church. Eventually, by 9:45 when the mass was finished, the crowd outside had completely blocked the doors so that the crowd inside couldn't get out, except to trickle down the stairs one by one against a resistent crowd of Catholics. This was not that surprising to us as we've had similar experiences in Kenya (mostly at elevators - the worst!); but, we didn't want to get trampled so we were not at the front of the pack at all. The kids were extremely well behaved during all of this waiting and crowding. By the time we got inside the church, it was 10:05 and there was not a single free seat. The chairs set up outside were also already taken. It was getting hotter and hotter, and we had already been there for close to an hour!

Sigh. I was sad about not going to Mass, but with two little ones what else could we do? I said some prayers privately and we went out to brunch. These two were as sweet as all the candy they ate that morning (and, yes, it is a pretty big deal that Grace wore a dress!).

The rest of our day involved some naps (me and Noah) and some hanging stuff up around the house (Kristoffer and Grace), and going for a swim at the pool at Grace's school for the first time...which was awesome!